Article about the DLC -- The Industrial Authoritarians

Armstead

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Sat Dec-29-07 11:51 AM
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Article about the DLC -- The Industrial Authoritarians

This article outlines reason 107 of what's wrong with the DLC, and why this election is so important, in terms of framing what the hell the Democratic Party is going to stand for and who it will represent.

(If it's been posted as a thread before, I apologize. But such information is important to keep in mind.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/the-trouble-with-the-dlc_b_60210.html

The Trouble with the DLC

By Glen W. Smith\

Excerpts:

Why are Harold Ford and others from the more paternalistic and condescending quarters of the Democratic Party so keen on discrediting the rising progressive movement? What have been the consequences of their obsession with "the middle"? Most importantly, how have the Tory Democrats managed to bury the expression of deep progressive values, and what should the progressive movement do about it?

For three decades, advocates of "centrism" have used their money to monopolize the Democratic message and leave the progressive base out in the cold, not spoken to. Since its founding in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has been leading this effort. How did they pull this off? Before we get into that, let's call them what they are. "Centrist" implies conciliation, moderation, compromise. It reinforces the mistaken idea that our political life falls along a neat, linear scale from left to right. That metaphor makes the center a pretty good and safe place to be. And that it certainly is not.

The plutocratic Democrats should be referred to not as centrists, but as industrial authoritarians. Their movement was born after the Nixon re-election in 1972. They blamed that landslide on Democratic Party rules changes that audaciously sought to include Americans formerly excluded from the back rooms of power. They fronted for older corporate interests -- oil and gas, finance, insurance. The are really 19th-Century paternalists who would save us from ourselves by keeping us far from the plantation's Big House....

...Progressive base voters, especially in African-American, Latino, and other disenfranchised communities, were abandoned when it came to Democrats voicing their values. Democrats could appeal to voters in the so-called middle with technocratic policies, promises of competence, and wonkish mumbo jumbo that either: 1) avoided values altogether; 2) Or, appealed outright to the authoritarian, "strict father" side of white suburban voters. Crime is a great example. The industrial authoritarians promised super-heroic crime-fighting sprees that would even embarrass Republicans. Forget the root causes of crime, like inescapable poverty, illness, crumbling schools, the disappearance of hope....

....(But)The rise of the progressive movement in the early years of the 21st Century challenges this monopoly. The movement is listening to progressives of all kinds and colors, and it's driving new messages of hope between and right through election cycles. a funny thing is happening. The core values of progressives are appealing to Americans of all kinds. It turns out that many of those so-called swing voters share these core values. They were longing to hear them expressed just as those formerly identified as the core progressive base were.

Hence the DLC's vicious attempts to discredit the movement. And that's what they want. They don't seek to win an argument over policy. They seek to destroy the credibility of their opponents and restore their message monopoly. If they don't, they may face the creation of truly universal health care, for instance. And then what in the world will their friends in the insurance industry do? Why, they won't have the money to keep the industrial authoritarians in power.